Polycub: Kingdom & xPolycub Analysis & UX

Clearly I am not Khal's favorite person right now!

Actually I've been pissing a lot of people off lately.
Maybe the problem is with me?

Yes that does certainly seem to be the vibe.

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Capitulation

So yeah if you can't tell we have not gotten to the anger stage yet. Users are still pretty hopeful. Yield is still pretty good, and even with a declining price of Polycub, the yield mitigates a lot if not all of those losses. For the past week or so it's been a bit of a wash.

However, lurking in the background, there is a definite sense of desperation in the air as all investors are being constantly instructed to HODL and have diamond paws or what have you. Price will go up! The way xPolycub works is number only go up!

March 17th, 2022: XPOLYCUB MECHANICS

When I wrote this post about xPolycub it was not obvious at all how bearish I was in the short-mid term. I still had over $50k in at the time and I was looking for exit liquidity, but it was still tough to stay quiet so I figured if I explained how it worked in detail some would read between the lines and see the problems with what was happening. Not sure if that happened or not but I also don't really care honestly. DYOR and all that. This whole thing was like playing a zero-sum poker game, and I intended to "win".

It's a pretty cool little way of doing it that might even be slightly more secure/efficient than the CUB kingdom because of how it works.

This was my concluding statement.

Reworded in another way, what I wanted to say was something like:

xPolycub is 99% the same as the CUB kingdom and marketing it as a number only go up miracle is super irresponsible and disingenuous.

But again I was HEAVILY financially incentivized to not say those things because I needed to GTFO first and stop degen gambling my ass off. Once we get all the way to #5: capitulation, I'll be sure to dip my toes back into this market as it will actually be possible to make money again when there is blood in the streets.

Imagine me trying to say that the CUB kingdom is a number only go up solution because the amount of CUB in my wallet is going up. You'd call me out instantly and point out that the price of CUB went from $13 to 20 cents and everyone that held their money in the den bled out, and you'd be right. So why then, is xPolycub being marketed in that exact way when it is the exact same scenario? The only answer I have is because the marketing and description of this single staking pool emulates the same logic and delusion as a Ponzi scheme. It's a neat little trick that is tricking a lot of people, perhaps even the LEOfinance team itself (actually I'd bet on it). Lot's of people are drinking this Koolaid it seems.

Again, there is nothing fundamentally different from the CUB kingdom and xPolycub. They are both single-staking pools with yield being allocated to them. xPolycub is simply being allocated way way way more yield than the CUB kingdom was during launch. That is essentially the only difference, and it is obviously an unsustainable one considering Polycub is an aggressively hyperdeflationary network.

The cool thing about xPolycub is that the number of xpc tokens one has never changes, so it is much easier to keep track of over time. Also the CUB kingdom basically has to control the assets in a weird way and only compounds twice a day, whereas xpc compounds dynamically in real time and seems to have more decentralized security (maybe I'm wrong) due to the way it works.

Still, none of these small upgrades come even close to the marketing behind the asset as a number-go-up guarantee. We can use the same logic to say the CUB kingdom also has a number-go-up guarantee. Tomorrow you will have more CUB in the kingdom than you did yesterday: therefore number can only go up. Needless to say the marketing for xpc is hugely problematic and even pyramid-scheme adjacent, especially considering how hard it is being shilled by users who hold massive amount of it.

Do I think Polycub is a Ponzi?

HHHhhmmmMMmmmm... no, I do not.
I know it is being marketed like a Ponzi.
I know there is a lot of excitement behind the project.
I know people are being very irrational about it.
But it is clearly not an intentional scam.
The grind will continue, and value will be built and captured.
But the launch was very much butchered in many ways that I will outline.

Every good pyramid scheme needs a way of funneling money up the chain through the uplines to the founder and the other big players. On any DEFI project, it is actually very easy to identify who is benefiting the most and how they are doing it. Everything is on a public blockchain and all of the inflation allocations are known. Surprisingly, if a cryptocurrency is a scam, it's actually much easier to detect than a legacy Ponzi scheme that can hide the flow of money with certain tricks that have been developed over the decades.

All we have to do is look at inflation.

So where is inflation allocated on Polycub?

8 places are allocated yield on Polycub

Farm	Multiplier	TVL
XPOLYCUB	x3	$1.5M
POLYCUB/USDC	x1.5	$0.28M
POLYCUB/ETH	x1.5	$0.24M
pLEO/MATIC	x1	$0.64M
BTC/ETH	x0.75	$1.75M
ETH/DAI	x0.75	$1.08M
BTC/ETH/USD	x0.75	$1.18M
DAI/USDT/USDC	x0.75	$1.75M

For a total multiplier of x10

So right off the bat we can see how poorly yield was allocated to the system. During the CUB launched we figured out quite quickly that allocating a lot of yield to farms that aren't paired to the main token were a net loss, and we moved to greatly reduce those allocations because it was known to be completely unsustainable.

Yet Polycub allocates 40% of all yield to non-Polycub farms? Why? We already know that doesn't work. Why did we make the same mistake all over again as if we learned nothing from the first launch? There are many explanations for this move.

First of all, saying 40% of all yield was allocated to non-Polycub farms is a blatant manipulation of the data because we know that it was financially viable to farmed locked tokens and take a 50% penalty on farm. This 50% penalty went directly into the xpolycub farm, so not only was xpolycub farming 30% raw emissions, but also pretty much half of everything else, for a total of 65% of all yield going into the xpolycub farm. Probably round down to 60% if we assume that some people didn't farm locked tokens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHNBKg9xI6Q&ab_channel=TheOffice

Our deflation is the only thing keeping us in business.

Actually the deflation is putting you out of business.

Could you please crunch the numbers again?

Beep boop beep

Did it help?

These numbers don't lie.

Look at the TVL. xPolycub has $1.5M sitting in it, and that money is a huge liability to the network and provides zero entrance or exit liquidity. In essence, the xPolycub pool has become a premine of tokens designed to enrich LEO degens, but it's going to backfire pretty badly... because guess what? No one wants to buy a premined illiquid token that's going to get dumped on them as they are used for exit liquidity.

The hyperdeflationary operations of Polycub were marketed as a way to "decentralize" and get tokens into everyone's hands. Well, that's the opposite of what hyperdelfation does, so again we see that the marketing is delusional and borderline pyramid scheme. Don't get me wrong I love I good pyramid scheme. Remember Drugwars? Ah, Drugwars was hilarious.

_{@themarkymark knows what I'm talkin about.}

Also that's a lot of ETH pairings...

It did not occur to me until yesterday as to why there were so many ETH pairs. Four out of ten pools are paired to ETH? Wow! That's wild. ETH is cool and everything but why would we be aggressively allocating yield to it like this, especially when the network itself is powered by Polygon and the MATIC token? That doesn't make very much sense.

It was then I realized that kingdoms were basically used as a way for whales to free-farm premine the token without taking any risk, and that is the reason why they were allocated so much yield despite being it being a known issue that allocating yield to random farms is less than worthless to the network as a whole.

Do we perhaps know an ETH whale or two that massively supports the LEO ecosystem and has often been known to support this community and prop up the liquidity pools (especially on wLEO/ETH)? Hm, yes. That would certainly explain why 37.5% of all yield on the network is being allocated to ETH pairings, wouldn't it?

And do not misinterpret my tone, I don't even think this is necessarily a bad thing. Supporting the investors that support the LEO ecosystem is obviously not a stupid way to do business. I just think that marketing it as "fair" and "sustainable" and "decentralized" is not super accurate. Again, I don't really care much because everyone on LEO seems chill enough. I don't dislike anyone. Same team.

But even someone like me who had $50k to throw into this thing as a hardcore gamble didn't have the money to pile into the kingdoms as well. I took huge risks with my money and provided actual liquidity to this network while those who had more money than me could just farm easy-mode pools that were being allocated massive amounts of unsustainable yields and provided zero value to the network in return.

But what about the Vault (POL)?

First of all, where is the vault?
I want to see it.

https://docs.polycub.com/mechanics/protocol-liquidity

The docs imply that the vault can be viewed.

Yeah, I'm not seeing that button, and hinging every last hope on the Vault as the thing that will eventually bring sustainability to Polycub is extremely thin when the vault isn't even accessible or viewable. Pretty unprofessional honestly. There's no sugarcoating it.

Kingdoms

The real point here is that I would make that claim that kingdoms were totally worthless and they invited bots to the network to free-farm the network and dump on all of us. Simply telling people what their APR is in a kingdom implies they will dump the Polycub and compound the assets they were holding. Not a great implication.

However when we peek at where the money on Polycub actually is, it's clear that kingdoms were used much more for premining and HODLing xpc than actually dumping on the market and putting those tokens in the main two LPs.

But don't worry: Polycub is sustainable.

Imagine lighting $1000 on fire and being like: "Don't worry I'm going to make that money back in some other way." That is basically what's happening here. The idea is that the Vault (Protocol Owned Liquidity) will eventually flip bullish and carry us into a sustainable future. I have an idea... how about next time we make it sustainable right from the beginning instead of letting whales premine the token and market the premine as decentralization?

If we wanted to fund the Vault with money... we don't need kingdoms. Imagine giving someone $1000 and having them give you back $100 and calling that sustainable. Imagine being like, "Oh don't worry... when we are giving them $50 and they are still giving us $100 we'll make all the money back and it's going to be sustainable." Seriously, make it make sense. The money in the kingdoms is just going to leave when we stop paying them more than we are extracting from them. So... so obviously.

Again, if the Vault needs to be seeded with liquidity, it would have just been ten times smarter to print out tokens directly and dump them onto the market to fund it. We would have funded the vault with ten times more liquidity and not heinously centralized the token distribution.

Farm	Multiplier	TVL
XPOLYCUB	x3	$1.5M
POLYCUB/USDC	x1.5	$0.28M
POLYCUB/ETH	x1.5	$0.24M
pLEO/MATIC	x1	$0.64M
BTC/ETH	x0.75	$1.75M
ETH/DAI	x0.75	$1.08M
BTC/ETH/USD	x0.75	$1.18M
DAI/USDT/USDC	x0.75	$1.75M

The TVL speaks for itself.

We needed as much liquidity in the POLYCUB/USDC and POLYCUB/ETH pools as possible. Instead because of the way this launch was structured, those pools are the smallest ones by exponential margins. Our entrance and exit liquidity has been completely shot, and users in the single-staking pool can not exit without exponentially pushing the price down.

Also, TVL is a bullshit metric that means nothing, and I don't understand why everyone makes such a big deal about it. Seriously? Who cares? Wow, millions of dollars are farming farms that don't help the network. Amazing! Huge number good!

If I was in charge of this launch I would have allocated 100% of all yield to the farms during a fair launch... because the farms are literally the only pools that have actual value to the network. Single staking pools don't need to be allocated any yield until price needs to be propped up to prevent the slow bleed... after it is determined that a slow bleed is happening in the first place, and not during the middle of the crazy volatile price discovery phase.

If the Vault needed to be seeded with liquidity, we should have just allocated yield to it directly instead of this roundabout premine kingdoms version that's bound to blow up in our faces. There's a very good reason why the first DEFI coins allocated yield to things like BTC/ETH pools. It's because DEFI was new and they wanted to get the attention of big money. It was a gimmick. An unsustainable one, and we keep copying it like it's going to work for us even though it will never work again. That ship has sailed; stop doing it.

The only reason to allocate yield to a kingdom is if that token listing is helping ours in some way... Like an IDO that allocates yield to our token or other alliances we make with small communities or LEO bridge liquidity. Allocating yield to something like BTC/ETH is 100% worthless. It will always cost more than we get back. It is a sunk cost. Stop doing it.

That being said we already have the code that creates composable LPs that farm the best farms. Yeah, sure... that's cool... just do that without allocating 1000% yields to it at the start. Waste of money is a waste of money.

Don't worry it will flip sustainable.

But I think at the end of the day nobody thought any of this actually mattered because the token is hyperdeflationary, and even if we make a big splash at the beginning and waste a ton of money... that money wouldn't have been truly wasted because it generates excitement and marketing would bring in a lot of value from the outside. Hyperdeflation would then automatically take over and stem all the bleeding that was happening during launch, and we'd be good to go in a sustainable network.

Yeah I highly doubt that will happen.

Investors keep getting told time and time again don't worry hyperdeflation is coming and supply will be cut soon. Yet we already know this isn't bullish from the CUB launch. When inflation goes down, yields go down. When yields go down, liquidity goes down. In economics it is known that hyperdeflation is just about the worst thing that could happen to an economy, but crypto still celebrates it like it's the best thing ever. Why?

Either the yield we print is worth it, or it isn't worth it. There isn't some kind of secret pre-determined inflation rate that's going to magically allocate inflation to the right places at the right times. That's delusional thinking.

Emission cut: onto month 2

In five days, emissions will be cut from 2 to 1; the first true halving event of Polycub. We will also have bonding soon. Both of these things are very bearish, especially in the short term. Bonding requires LP tokens, and most of the money is in xpolycub. Thus polycub will need to be sold to partake in bonding, but there is very little liquidity to sell polycub. There will be even less when emissions cut from 2 to 1 and liquidity providers cut and run.

Cub Airdrop

During the entire month of April, the CUB airdrop is going to be pretty much the best way to farm Polycub until it inevitably ends. The CUB airdrop is linear, and Polycub yield is hyperdeflationary. Now that emissions have gone from 5 to 1, the CUB airdrop is much more appealing than any of the farms.

1M tokens will be minted for Polycub, but those will be spread across all ten farms. The farm that is allocated the most (xpolycub) will also be the highest risk. Meanwhile, the CUB airdrop will be minting 500k coins and the liquidity pools there are much larger. CUB currently has a market cap of $3M, and the MC is known to flux between $2M-$5M. Buying in at $3M is not a big risk, and the APY of the kingdom when calculating the airdrop into it is pretty decent compared to the yields offered elsewhere.

Polycub UX

So think about this months down the line... What are users going to do? Are they going to farm pCUB/ETH for 10% APR, only to have to wait 90 days to claim such paltry rewards? Or are they going to realize that this is a failed experiment and head back to CUB on BSC? Hm... 10% APR and 90 day wait vs 80% APR and 0 day wait. I wonder what users are going to pick.

Random numbers for "sustainability" keep getting thrown out there with no data to actually back them up. I keep hearing tales of 30%-50% yields on farms with nothing to support these numbers. The Vault is the key to sustainability and yet it is not even accessible on the website. I 100% guarantee that the Vault isn't going to have enough money in it to prop up these yields that high.

Conclusion

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Capitulation

I'm not buying back into Polycub until people are fucking furious and rage-quitting after getting burned in exactly the same way they got burned in the CUB kingdom. That is what is going to happen. The only way to have made money during this thing was within the first three days. The only way to make money now is by farming the kingdom or the bridge (LEO/MATIC) and dumping the farm every single day for free profit. Of course I've already moved back to CUB and am farming the airdrop because it has no penalty associated with it and CUB is way way way more stable after being operational for a year.

I think real damage has been done to this entire ecosystem. There are 1.5 MILLION LEO tokens in the pLEO/MATIC LP. What happens when yield there drops to 10%? Either the LEO gets sold or it crowds bLEO/BNB. I think a lot of it is going to get sold because a lot of it was purchased solely to participate in the unsustainable farm game.

Money was sucked into Polycub like a blackhole from the LEO and CUB ecosystems. Then Polycub bled out like a stuck pig due to an unfair launch and bots buying up the token for cheap and frontrunning everyone. Then the kingdoms were further farmed by bots and whales to premine the system. When everything is said and done, I'm not going to be surprised if every one of these tokens is scraping rock bottom because of how this all went down. This is not sustainable... at... all.

We allocated yields to places that we already knew for a fact were a bad idea from the CUB launch, and then we allocated 65% of all inflation into a single-staking pool, trapping investors in an illiquid container with no escape, and we call that sustainability and "number can only go up".

But truly, all is not lost. Market cap for pCUB is already down to $2.2M, which is already pretty low. The marketing campaign continues, and so does development like loans/bonds/pendulum/vault. On top of all that I'm predicting that the market is going to be bullish for another 3 months, and who knows when that IDO will decide when to use CUB as a launchpad during the good times.

Obviously the LEOfinance team is not some malicious group trying to separate their users from their money. Real value is being built, I just think it's going to be a very ridiculously bumpy road on the way to greatness.

And I also think I got it all out of my system. All the shit-talking is gone. @edicted is out of gas and ready to move on. There's a lot to be learned from this launch and we aren't going to know for sure how it all turns out until we test these things directly in the field.

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta